Jane Chen / Shanghai Daily news

Shanghai Unicom, a local arm of China's second-largest mobile telecom operator, China United Telecommunications Corp, will market low-priced CDMA handsets in May on the local market, today's Youth Daily reported.
The first batch of 15,000 phones, all with color displays and probably priced at around 700 yuan (US$85) each, will enter the market along with some new telecom fee policies, the report said.
Some 3 million phones like these will go on sale nationwide.  This is China Unicom's strategy for promoting its CDMA business by directly purchasing low-priced phones from phone makers.
Upbeat over the lower-end phones, analysts are expecting the handsets to give a new boost to the CDMA business.  They point out that the high prices of CDMA phones, which usually start at 2,000 yuan, have become a bottleneck in the development of the CDMA business. Realizing this, China Unicom, the only telecom operator of CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, has developed the direct purchase of low-end phones as a key strategy this year to explore the market.